Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer — Complete by Walter Scott (good books to read in english .TXT) 📗

removal of Meg Merrilies, those who remained with Hatteraick attempted to make him sit down upon a fragment of rock which lay close upon the high-water mark. A strong shuddering convulsed his iron frame for an instant as he resisted their purpose. ‘Not there! Hagel! you would not make me sit THERE?’

These were the only words he spoke; but their import, and the deep tone of horror in which they were uttered, served to show what was passing in his mind.

When Meg Merrilies had also been removed from the cavern, with all the care for her safety that circumstances admitted, they consulted where she should be carried. Hazlewood had sent for a surgeon, and proposed that she should be lifted in the meantime to the nearest cottage. But the patient exclaimed with great earnestness, ‘Na, na, na! to the Kaim o’ Derncleugh--the Kaim o’ Derncleugh; the spirit will not free itself o’ the flesh but there.’

‘You must indulge her, I believe,’ said Bertram; ‘her troubled imagination will otherwise aggravate the fever of the wound.’

They bore her accordingly to the vault. On the way her mind seemed to run more upon the scene which had just passed than on her own approaching death. ‘There were three of them set upon him: I brought the twasome, but wha was the third? It would be HIMSELL, returned to work his ain vengeance!’

It was evident that the unexpected appearance of Hazlewood, whose person the outrage of Hatteraick left her no time to recognise, had produced a strong effect on her imagination. She often recurred to it. Hazlewood accounted for his unexpected arrival to Bertram by saying that he had kept them in view for some time by the direction of Mannering; that, observing them disappear into the cave, he had crept after them, meaning to announce himself and his errand, when his hand in the darkness encountering the leg of Dinmont had nearly produced a catastrophe, which, indeed, nothing but the presence of mind and fortitude of the bold yeoman could have averted.

When the gipsy arrived at the hut she produced the key; and when they entered, and were about to deposit her upon the bed, she said, in an anxious tone, ‘Na, na! not that way--the feet to the east’; and appeared gratified when they reversed her posture accordingly, and placed her in that appropriate to a dead body.

‘Is there no clergyman near,’ said Bertram, ‘to assist this unhappy woman’s devotions?’

A gentleman, the minister of the parish, who had been Charles Hazlewood’s tutor, had, with many others, caught the alarm that the murderer of Kennedy was taken on the spot where the deed had been done so many years before, and that a woman was mortally wounded. From curiosity, or rather from the feeling that his duty called him to scenes of distress, this gentleman had come to the Kaim of Derncleugh, and now presented himself. The surgeon arrived at the same time, and was about to probe the wound; but Meg resisted the assistance of either. ‘It’s no what man can do that will heal my body or save my spirit. Let me speak what I have to say, and then ye may work your will; I’se be nae hindrance. But where’s Henry Bertram?’ The assistants, to whom this name had been long a stranger, gazed upon each other. ‘Yes!’ she said, in a stronger and harsher tone, ‘I said HENRY BERTRAM OF ELLANGOWAN. Stand from the light and let me see him.’

All eyes were turned towards Bertram, who approached the wretched couch. The wounded woman took hold of his hand. ‘Look at him,’ she said, ‘all that ever saw his father or his grandfather, and bear witness if he is not their living image?’ A murmur went through the crowd; the resemblance was too striking to be denied. ‘And now hear me; and let that man,’ pointing to Hatteraick, who was seated with his keepers on a sea-chest at some distance--’let him deny what I say if he can. That is Henry Bertram, son to Godfrey Bertram, umquhile of Ellangowan; that young man is the very lad-bairn that Dirk Hatteraick carried off from Warroch wood the day that he murdered the gauger. I was there like a wandering spirit, for I longed to see that wood or we left the country. I saved the bairn’s life, and sair, sair I prigged and prayed they would leave him wi’ me. But they bore him away, and he’s been lang ower the sea, and now he’s come for his ain, and what should withstand him? I swore to keep the secret till he was ane-an’-twenty; I kenn’d he behoved to dree his weird till that day cam. I keepit that oath which I took to them; but I made another vow to mysell, that if I lived to see the day of his return I would set him in his father’s seat, if every step was on a dead man. I have keepit that oath too. I will be ae step mysell, he (pointing to Hatteraick) will soon be another, and there will be ane mair yet.’

The clergyman, now interposing, remarked it was a pity this deposition was not regularly taken and written down, and the surgeon urged the necessity of examining the wound, previously to exhausting her by questions. When she saw them removing Hatteraick, in order to clear the room and leave the surgeon to his operations, she called out aloud, raising herself at the same time upon the couch, ‘Dirk Hatteraick, you and I will never meet again until we are before the judgment-seat; will ye own to what I have said, or will you dare deny it?’ He turned his hardened brow upon her, with a look of dumb and inflexible defiance. ‘Dirk Hatteraick, dare ye deny, with my blood upon your hands, one word of what my dying breath is uttering?’ He looked at her with the same expression of hardihood and dogged stubbornness, and moved his lips, but uttered no sound. ‘Then fareweel!’ she said, ‘and God forgive you! your hand has sealed my evidence. When I was in life I was the mad randy gipsy, that had been scourged and banished and branded; that had begged from door to door, and been hounded like a stray tyke from parish to parish; wha would hae minded HER tale? But now I am a dying woman, and my words will not fall to the ground, any more than the earth will cover my blood!’

She here paused, and all left the hut except the surgeon and two or three women. After a very short examination he shook his head and resigned his post by the dying woman’s side to the clergyman.

A chaise returning empty to Kippletringan had been stopped on the highroad by a constable, who foresaw it would be necessary to convey Hatteraick to jail. The driver, understanding what was going on at Derncleugh, left his horses to the care of a blackguard boy, confiding, it is to be supposed, rather in the years and discretion of the cattle than in those of their keeper, and set off full speed to see, as he expressed himself, ‘whaten a sort o’ fun was gaun on.’ He arrived just as the group of tenants and peasants, whose numbers increased every moment, satiated with gazing upon the rugged features of Hatteraick, had turned their attention towards Bertram. Almost all of them, especially the aged men who had seen Ellangowan in his better days, felt and acknowledged the justice of Meg Merrilies’s appeal. But the Scotch are a cautious people: they remembered there was another in possession of the estate, and they as yet only expressed their feelings in low whispers to each other. Our friend Jock Jabos, the postilion, forced his way into the middle of the circle; but no sooner cast his eyes upon Bertram than he started back in amazement, with a solemn exclamation, ‘As sure as there’s breath in man, it’s auld Ellangowan arisen from